Rom Mojica’s Reviews > Shard Cinema > Status Update

In the home stretch now! This final section is focusing really heavily on the camera as an entity with films - I don't know if it's quite as strong as what preceded, but it does have me curious to look for other writing on this.

Finally through the actual "Shard Cinema" essay itself. Very beefy, but a convergence of a lot of what the book had been building towards: the monumental, unbelievable labor that goes into every moment of modern blockbusters, how much focus they put on putting the money on the screen, how these shots blur the acts of creating and watching movies. And he's still a magnificent writer.

I don't read many academic books so I was getting through this going "hm I'm liking it but it feels disjointed - like shards, if you will" and then I got to one of the essays that pulls it all together and realized the first half (!) of this book was just catching me up so it could really go in on its core ideas now.

There's a part of this where it almost feels silly, like the author is going "you ever notice that movies make screens feel cold and unfeeling, but you're watching it on a screen? what's up with that???" but luckily the analysis delves in deeper about why that might be, what it says about us, and what it says about aesthetics.

Wound up rereading some since it's been a bit since I read this, but still amazed at how beautifully it's written and easy to get into. Through the history of film, it weaves in histories of colonialism, labor, racism, industrialization, and how they all intersect in various different ways. It's really heavy work done with extreme grace.

Manages to talk about smartphones and their modern ubiquity while avoiding the "we're more connected.... yet we're more disconnected than ever!" tropes of your Black Mirrors or bad comedians. Instead it talks about the changes in us through the motions, gestures, and patterns we've picked up, and how before 2007ish so few of us had such constant interaction with glassy surfaces. Evan Calder Williams is a good writer.

It's a small update just to say that this book has fallen into a more understandable form and Evan Calder Williams is a really clever and interesting writer.

This book was not meant to be read on kindle - an already unusual structure becomes even more confusing and off-kilter feeling when the arrangement doesn't even match what it should be. The first shard and intro have me worried I've bitten off more than I can chew, but I'm hoping the opening is just too much info too fast and the rest is paced in a way I can keep up with better.